A former MP, who was falsely accused of being part of a VIP paedophile ring, has won a rare libel action over comments made about him on social media.

John Hemming, who was the Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley between 2005 and 2014, had been accused of being part of a group that had abused children in Staffordshire in the 1980s and 1990s.

His accuser, Esther Baker, waived her anonymity in 2015, to make the claims, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), later concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge him.

Now Mr Hemming has won damages and apologies from two of Miss Baker’s supporters, who posted comments online that implied the former politician was guilty.

Graham Wilmer, founder of the Lantern Project a charity, which helps abuse survivors, and journalist David Hencke, who worked for the now defunct website, Exaro, agreed to pay more than £10,000 after accepting their comments were defamatory.

The Telegraph also quotes Hemming as alluding to the case of Declan Canning, a man who was convicted last year of sending him threatening messages – Canning had a grudge against Hemming relating to his activism around family courts, but his messages referred to him as a “dirty paedophile” who had “raped Esther”.

The libel case was settled out of court, and some details of Hencke’s settlement were reported on social media last month: Hencke himself posted a statement about it on 19 December, in which he stated that

Mr Hemming alleges that the article is defamatory of him and suggests that certain passages of that article imply that he is guilty of raping Esther Baker. That is not what I intended the article to mean.

Baker’s allegation against Hemming dates back to 2015, when she made a number of media appearances, although his name was not published. She claimed to have experienced sex abuse as a child in a woodland location at the hands of a group of adults associated with a church, and also including others such as “a Lord” and a “senior politician”. She further alleged that police had guarded the spot and prevented her from escaping; the term “Satanic Ritual Abuse” was not used, but it was obviously implied by the ritualistic setting and role inversions. At the time, with the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Midland in full swing, the media was eagerly reporting any story that pertained to allegations of “VIP abuse”, although a police investigation has since failed to substantiate her claims and more recent headlines refer to her in quote-marks as a alleged “fantasist”. (1)

After Baker first made her claims, Tom Watson MP called for a “comprehensive investigation”, and Baker was also supported by three other Members of Parliament: John Mann (who raised her name in the House of Commons chamber), Sarah Champion and Jess Phillips, who defeated Hemming in the 2015 general election. (2) Hemming’s name remained out of the media, but it was passed around among self-styled activists and featured in in an open-air speech made by Bill Maloney at a protest event opposite Downing Street in June 2015. Hemming went public himself after the police investigation ended in 2017.

Baker says that she remembered Hemming as being one of her childhood abusers after seeing his photograph online. This was around the time when there was some disagreement over proposals for the running of the IICSA, about which Hemming had expressed a view that differed from Wilmer. Wilmer runs a counselling project in Liverpool called the Lantern Project, which has been criticised for its therapeutic approach (NHS funding was withdrawn in late 2015). Baker received assistance from the Lantern Project, although a suggestion in the Sunday Times that her alleged memories had arisen out of counselling there was incorrect. (3)

Wilmer used to have presence on Twitter, where he would repeatedly Tweet the phrase “tick tock” as an apparent indication that critics would soon be the subject of discrediting developments, perhaps including police intervention. I found these aggressive and gleeful posts to be curiously at odds with his professional persona, which had previously been built up in the media over several years.

Somewhat cryptically, the Telegraph story simultaneously quotes Wilmer as apologising for having “caused Mr Hemming and his family upset and distress” but his lawyer as saying that he had “lodged a full defence”.

UPDATE: Baker says that she has submitted formal complaints about the Telegraph and a derivative re-write in the Mail. In particular, she complains that it has been inaccurately reported that Hencke and Wilmer have agreed not to refer to her again as a “victim” or “survivor”, when the restriction refers only to claims that infer Hemming’s guilt. Hencke has also stated that the Telegraph report is inaccurate, and that his settlement included “got no damages, no costs, no apology,no liability over any tweet. I happily agreed to give £500 to Victim Support for domestic abuse.”

Footnotes

1. Baker also alleges that she remembers Hemming from a domestic setting. She has also claimed to have been taken by night to Dolphin Square in London, although this part of her story hasn’t been emphasised for some time, and to have been abused again later as a teenager. However, her teenage allegations appear to be concerned with an unrelated local context (e.g. a former employer) rather than conspiracies involving VIPs.

Baker has further suggested that abuse occurred in foreign orphanages, and in December she said that she has evidence concerning links between “Bristol/Philippines & PIE” (the Paedophile Information Exchange) that she wanted to present to the IICSA, but that she is being prevented from doing so by “Westminster inference”. She heavily implied that her information is pertinent to the case of Douglas Slade, a PIE member from Bristol who committed abuse in the Philippines after moving there in 1980.

2. Phillips addressed disparaging comments about Hemming to Baker and others on Twitter in the wake of the election, stating “I blocked Hemming last night after creepy ‘I’m watching you’ style tweets” – in particular that Hemming “asked me ‘if I was having a nice drink in prince of wales’ which was were I was”. For her part, Champion (who frequently speaks on the subject of grooming gangs) has sympathised with Baker’s complaint about recent sceptical media coverage, Tweeting that “One day they’ll believe the victim – but it feels a very long way off!”

3. Also in 2015, an advocacy group called Reflections UK was founded by Baker, Phil Lafferty and Jenny Tomlin, with Wilmer serving as “Police Liaison Advisor”. The launch was attended by Jess Phillips and Nicky Morgan MPs. The group appears to no longer exist, although an archived version of its website from 2016 can be seen here. At that time, Baker’s co-chairs were Jennie Grace (var. Jenny Grace) and one Jacky Hughes. The bioblurb confirms that Jennie Grace is the same person as Esther Grace, author of a 2009 memoir titled Nowhere to Belong, published by Hodder under the pen-name Harmony Brookes: her account of being repeatedly raped by soldiers on a UK military base as a child was summarised in early 2015 by the SundayExpress‘s James Fielding after she waived her anonymity. Fielding, whose journalism has also promoted Bill Maloney and self-styled “police whistleblower” Jon Wedger, included the detail that police were investigating her claims, but no prosecutions appear to have followed.

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The MP’s who supported Baker are all Labour, which raises potential conflict of interest issues (ethically and morally, not legally), although given the swing against the Lib Dems in 2015, Hemming would probably have lost his seat regardless of the allegations (then not public, but his attention would presumably have been distracted from campaigning, to put it mildy).

(I’d also note that despite managing to be on holiday at a time when one of Exaro’s other accusers was experiencing ‘legal difficulties’, he has found time to retweet a link to his head-in-the-sand holiday blog which came from – who else? – Exaro.)

They are simultaneously spoofing both the SRA hoax of the 1980s/early 1990s and the tendency of tabloid media, when they have libelled someone and an apology is required, to devote much less space to the apology than the allegations, or even, as in the Viz spoof, draw further attention to the allegations by re-iterating them.

It would be interesting to know the backgrounds of people who make wild claims of this kind and manage to convince others of them. Have they done anything similar before or do they just come out of nowhere?

There was a bizarre spat on Twitter last night between Esther Baker and Ian McFadyen, with the latter accusing the former of assisting a private investigator working on behalf of a Scottish priest currently in prison for child abuse. Ms Baker huffed and puffed, as she is prone to doing, but there appeared to be no outward denial of McFadyen’s allegation.

During the exchange, she published a partial screenshot of the paperwork concerning the upcoming Hemming Vs Baker civil action, in which it seems Hemming is asking the court to state the allegations Baker made against him are false and therefore she is a liar. Seems reasonable given the circumstances.

Meanwhile, Ms Baker received negative press attention in The Telegraph and Daily Mail on Monday and in The Times today. Unfortunately for her, I don’t think her week is going to get any better…

Still no sign of any of the “at least 15” girls who were also abused on Cannock Chase coming forward to back up Ms Baker’s account. Neither have any of the girls or boys who experienced the less than tender mercies of the medical room in London, which might or might not have been at Dolphin Square, chosen to confirm these events actually happened. (Apart from her former Exaro stablemate ‘Darren’, whatever happened to him btw?)

And Baker still refuses to name the peer who she says abused her, for reasons I cannot understand. Surely if all legal avenues have now been exhausted and the dead cannot sue her for libel, then she’d want to expose him for the vile monster he really was? Perhaps it would also encourage all of those reluctant witnesses to come forward?

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Note on Attacks

Anyone who comments on current affairs on-line risks being smeared by attack sites and/or abusive Tweets. This is particularly so if one chooses to challenge dishonesty or other kinds of reprehensible behaviour.

As a result of making a stand in a few particular instances, I have become the focus of a number of such attacks. Those who have targeted me include: a Nigerian evangelist who believes in “child witches”; former activists with the EDL; a man with a long history of bad debt and grandiosity; a sockpuppeting tabloid journalist; and a self-serving “celebrity” MP who deploys smears to discourage scrutiny.

The bad faith of such sites and Tweets ought to be self-evident. However, any readers interested in the true background can read this and this.